Two years ago, an explosion sent everything flying. Our houses. Our families. The innocent. Today our haggard souls still wander through our interior ruins, insulted by a justice that does not come, under the aegis of local mafiosos but also of international indifference in this great masquerade that is the stakes and the underside of the cards tear down. Today, two years later, do not forget. Or rather, as Joyce Mansour puts it so well: “Forget to better remember.” Because if surviving is an injunction of life, remembering is that of our still vivid consciousness. Of our indescribable traumas. Of our stigmatized bodies like Beirut.
Literature in all this? A tiny drop in an ocean of pain. Silence too. Nothing is worse for a writer than the loss of language. Two years ago, this anguish swung into the order of futility. A single painting embodied our amazement. The Scream, from Munch. It was on our knees and in silence that we picked up our rubble. With a surprising energy inversely proportional to the violence of this explosion, of a moment that lasted eternity. Which still lasts. Two years ago, my daughter (8 years old) was injured. A scratch will have been enough for my heart to stop beating at the thought of the worst. Not everyone was so lucky.
shameful impunity
Two years later, many are still counting in their flesh, their bones, and among their loved ones, irrecoverable losses. Beirut itself never ceases to symbolize, through its streets and building facades, the empty shell that this country has become through corruption, poor workmanship, state banditry, all with impunity that would bring shame to shame. Who assigns us all the better to fight. Do not forget that below the sum of our pain, there are faces. Disappeared people left in absolute indignity.
To continue to believe that the struggle prevails over all the zero degrees of the absurd and that this country will not be reborn from its ashes – worn out and perverse phrase – but indeed from the joint force of its social fabric. Because if this country is no longer one, by dint of seeing itself flouted, it is and will remain, a human potential. “You have to believe in fairies for them to exist,” my daughter once told me. Similarly, countries must be believed for them to exist. To their peoples. The living as well as the dead. That is honoring a collective memory.
Today, two years after the port explosion, I cling to the idea – and too bad if my faith seems to be a shipwreck from the outside – that it is enough to continue to believe to move mountains . Take up the challenge of this country bogged down in issues that go beyond it. Support those who struggle. Those who remain. Those who refuse to jump ship. Those who remember so as not to forget. Because this country is, whether we like it or not, despite those who will end up being judged for their crimes, a message of faith carried by its people.
Hyam Yared, Lebanese poet and novelist, is notably the author of under the arbor, Beirut as if oblivion, Everything is hallucinated, Implosions..